Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Mother's Day Brunch with My Favorite Lens

I hope you had a wonderful Mother's Day. Our family had brunch at a restaurant in Santa Monica called the Lobster. I brought my D600 and my favorite lens, the Nikon 85 1.8G.

To me, it is a little strange to have a favorite lens since each of my lenses has its purpose, so I can't really compare them. Nonetheless, the 85 1.8G is my favorite because it is very good at what it's supposed to do: it gives me sharp images, with quick and accurate focusing, and very shallow DOF with smooth bokeh (usually).

How sharp is the 85 1.8G? I took this shot of our daughter:

Here is a crop of the eye:

You can see not only my wife, but also me with my camera! And note that I did not apply any sharpening to this shot. I rarely find the need to sharpen shots from this lens. And as you can see, the focus was spot-on (this was with the viewfinder, not live view).

Anyway, we had a wonderful brunch. The sky was overcast but it was still nice to dine while watching people on the beach.

D7000 + Tokina 11-16. No it's not blown - there really was no detail in the overcast sky that day.

Here are some more shots from the 85 1.8G. This is a photography blog but I hope you guys don't mind me commenting on the food, which was excellent overall. The dish above was Sautéed New Caledonia Blue King Prawns. It was very flavorful and the prawns were cooked just right.

I also tried the Beluga Lentil Soup. The addition of chorizo and lobster to the lentil soup gave it a little extra flavor. No pictures because it was a plain-looking dish. :)

This was the Shellfish & Black Linguine Pasta. I'm not sure why the linguine is black, but the linguine had a flavor that reminded me of Filipino-style squid with ink. I'm not crazy about shellfish but my mother-in-law and my wife liked the dish very much. It was slightly spicy.

Like I said, I don't like shellfish too much, but I do like scallops. The Seared Day Boat Scallops had not just scallops but kurobuta (Berkshire pork) belly. This was my favorite dish from the brunch. The scallops were succulent and their flavor was complemented by the pork, which tasted somewhat like Chinese braised pork belly. The pork was especially tender, and the sweet fatty meat was so soft and juicy that I'm sure whatever calories and cholesterol it contained was worth it. Even the vegetable garnishing was delectable. It had cauliflowers, cherry tomatoes and farro. Somehow the combination of spices in the vegetables vaguely reminded me of another Filipino dish, tuna ceviche.

The salmon was to be honest a little disappointing. It was beautifully roasted but had a slightly fishy smell. Their salmon also didn't have that fatty taste that I like in salmon. My mother-in-law cooks better salmon from Costco.

We also had the steak and lobster. The lobster was of course steamed perfectly, although that was to be expected. The steak had a green peppercorn sauce. It was literally not bad -- nothing to criticize about it, but nothing spectacular either.

For desert, I had the Apple-Hazelnut Cake. I didn't taste much of the hazelnut but it was delicious nonetheless. My wife wasn't planning on eating any but once she tried it, she had some more. :)